Engines of Empathy (Drakeforth Series Book 1)

by Paul Mannering

  ‘We’ll be in touch when we have a valuation. Our commission is fifteen per cent of either the sale or the auction price. This counts as your receipt.’ I nodded, tears welling up in my eyes.

  ‘You are doing the right thing,’ he said, and reached out to pat me gently on the shoulder. I nodded again, wiping my eyes on my sleeve. Taking a deep breath I looked up and saw Coluthon jump down from the back of the truck. If Drakeforth didn’t do something spectacular soon, the entire plan would be for nothing.

  I took my copy of the invoice and agreement to sell an antique at auction. Benedict rode the loading platform to the ground. He stepped off and it folded like a duck’s wing against the back of the truck.

  ‘Have a nice day,’ he said and shouldered his way through the gesticulating crowd of motorists without so much as a glance above the knee at any of them.

  The truck started up a few moments later, I watched as it completed a seven-point turn and ground its way out of Bugle Street.

  I turned my back on the commuters berating me for delaying them and went back inside, feeling numb. I had just let the living oak desk that was the key to the entire puzzle be driven away by what I felt sure were agents of the enemy.

  Chapter 13

  Sitting in my home office, surrounded by stacks of books and papers, I stared at the indents in the carpet where the desk used to stand.

  The notion that I should have explained what was going on to the desk was irrational yet hard to shake. The desk couldn’t think. Empathic energy, even in living oak, was only a facsimile of life. What empathic energy engineers call anthropomorphic resonance. Our perception of and interaction with double-e flux-imbued items made them appear to behave in ways we could relate to. I felt guilt over burdening my appliances with my lack of enthusiasm every morning. It wasn’t the fridge’s fault that it was programmed to detect the level of preselected items and remind me when they were expired or otherwise needed replacement. If what Pretense said about my levels of empathic interaction were true, it was no wonder that everything I owned seemed to be closer to alive than even I felt most days.

  I resisted the urge to go and make a cup of tea and tell the kettle how I was feeling. It might blow a heating element or something. Sighing, I stood up and waited for the wave of dizzy nausea to pass.

  The rattling of the front door took me by surprise. I stumbled to it, wrenched it open and stared at the EGS Benedict and Associates moving truck parked outside.

  ‘I told you the plan would work,’ Drakeforth said from my feet. I looked down.

  ‘Drakeforth! What happened?’ A dark patch of red was spreading from his shoulder to soak the front of his shirt.

  ‘Turns out the woman had a knife in her boot. She cut herself free while I was tying up the little guy. She slashed me quite badly. It’s nothing an emergency blood transfusion, a few dozen stitches and a week in hospital won’t fix.’

  ‘I’m calling you an ambulance,’ I said, but Drakeforth grabbed my hand.

  ‘Please don’t. If I say, okay, you’ll say,, you’re an ambulance and then I’ll be forced to go wee-ooo-wee-ooo and frankly—’ he broke off coughing. ‘Frankly, I don’t have the strength for it.’

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ I reminded him.

  ‘No time, if we fuss about with emergency rooms and hospitals they will ask questions. The two trussed up in the back of the truck might well escape and my brilliant plan will have been for nothing.’

  I helped Drakeforth to his feet, half-dragging him back to the truck. With Drakeforth giving advice, seemingly at random, I got the engine started and the heavy vehicle in gear. ‘Drive like the wind to the Monastery of Saint Detriment,’ he said, slumping against the passenger side window.

  Driving less like the wind and more like a sea fog, I ploughed my way through the weekday traffic and in an hour we were on the open highway.

  I heard nothing from our trussed up captives in the back of the truck as I drove down the highway. I had no idea what we were meant to do with them and Drakeforth was of no help as he slipped in and out of consciousness, occasionally stirring to accuse me of writing down everything he said. Other times he would mutter odd quotations that sounded Arthurian. Night was falling when I turned off the highway and up the winding forest road that led to the monastery. By now Drakeforth had paled to the grey-green of fresh milk. He seemed to be barely breathing and the flow of blood from his wound had slowed to an oozing trickle.

  ‘Nearly there, Drakeforth,’ I said loudly. The truck growled and I worked the gears, looking for something low enough to get us up the last slope.

  The gates were closed and the visitors’ booth unattended. Even the car park was empty. I parked the truck next to the gate, slid out and banged on the solid wood.

  ‘Hello!?’ I yelled. ‘I need some help out here! I have an injured man!’ A full minute passed, and then I heard the rattling of chains and bolts. The smaller door set into the gate cracked open. ‘I’m afraid we are closed to visitors,’ the man on the other side began.

  ‘We’re not visitors!’ I shouted. ‘We’re travelling monks from the monastery in South Owad. We have been set upon by rabid cuttlefish. Brother Vole is badly injured.’ To my surprise the gate opened immediately.

  I raced back to the truck and supervised Drakeforth being lifted out by a multitude of helping hands. They carried him into the courtyard under the glow of lamp light and I followed in their wake.

  ‘Charlotte Pudding,’ Hoptoad said. ‘Your presence here poses an interesting paradox for my next meditation.’

  ‘Drakeforth has been stabbed, or cut. Either way he needs medical attention and we didn’t have time to go to the hospital,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Your friend is badly injured and instead of going to anyone of the fully equipped medical facilities that dot the cityscape and its satellite towns, you come all the way out here, where the best we can do is pray and perhaps put a clean bandage on it?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I admitted.

  ‘The best ones usually are,’ Hoptoad replied. ‘We will do what we can for brother Drakeforth, for we know not how the actions we take will change us and those we act against.’ The monks carrying Drakeforth disappeared into the darkness, carrying him on their shoulders like brown-robed pall bearers.

  ‘Now,’ said Hoptoad, ‘come and tell me everything.’

  We went to one of the common buildings where Arthurians sat and talked, drank tea or beer and read from holy texts. I sank into a soft armchair and accepted a steaming mug of walrusroot tea with a grateful smile. The air around us glowed in the light of fragrant oil lamps and racks of fat yellow candles.

  ‘Where to start …’ I said.

  ‘You have already started,’ Hoptoad said. ‘Your choice is to now decide how you are going to shape reality by introducing me to it. It’s an astonishing responsibility and one that I fear is taken all too lightly. People go rushing off telling stories without ever thinking of the effect they are going to have on their audience. Though I suppose if we thought about it too much, we’d never share anything.’

  ‘At the beginning, then?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘A good choice,’ Hoptoad said and sat back, a look of calm spreading across his lined face.

  I told him everything, in clear detail this time. Without the hysterics or the confusing tangents. Hoptoad displayed all the best qualities of a listener: he didn’t interrupt, he didn’t fall asleep and he didn’t make any odd sighing noises of boredom. He listened with an intensity that made me feel my story might be worth telling after all. When I was done, he straightened up and, taking a deep breath, offered me more tea.

  ‘Will Drakeforth be okay? I should be with him. He will be furious if he wakes up and finds he has been saved by religious people.’

  ‘Odd, isn’t he,’ Hoptoad said, showing no immediate inclination to move from his comfy chair.

  ‘Drakeforth? Very,’ I agreed.

  ‘It is odd that he opposes all that we believe so fer
ociously. Surely how we choose to spend our lives is little concern of his. We do not ask him to share our beliefs, or make special allowances for us. We live apart from his culture. We are self-contained and demand no tribute from him in time or material goods.’

  ‘He seems quite bothered by the Arthurians’ tax-exempt status,’ I suggested.

  ‘A hangover from an ancient accord. Arthurian monasteries and temples provide for society in other ways.’

  ‘Some people would say that you provide a safe environment for lunatics who would otherwise be accosting people on the streets.’ I’d spoken before I realised my words echoed Drakeforth’s rabidly secular sentiment. Still, it made Hoptoad chuckle.

  ‘We have done that at times. We have also provided food, shelter and counselling for those who have nowhere else to go. The most important thing we offer to anyone who has the strength to believe is the chance to become one with a higher power, to plumb the great mysteries of the universe.’

  ‘From where I’m sitting the chances of becoming one with a higher power seem very slim. It’s all right for you, you’ve spent thirty years growing your beard and making herbal remedies.’

  ‘If I shave my beard and cut what remains of my hair, I would still be at peace with Arthur,’ Hoptoad replied.

  ‘If what you believe was actually true, wouldn’t everyone be doing it? Wouldn’t it be so blindingly obvious we would all be wearing beards, robes and living the monastic lifestyle?’

  ‘There are none so blind as those that cannot see.’ Hoptoad quoted the words of Arthur that were displayed on one of the signs outside the gate.

  ‘That’s like saying, there are none so able to come dead last in a hundred yard swimming race as those with no arms and legs.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hoptoad smiled and nodded. ‘You have the makings of a fine Master of Art.’

  ‘I hardly think so. Don’t you need to be a special kind of person to attain that level in Arthurianism?’

  ‘A master is merely someone who started doing something before you,’ Hoptoad said.

  ‘I’m sure Drakeforth would say that also applies to those who simply suffered some kind of mental breakdown earlier.’

  ‘You place a lot of stock in what Drakeforth says, or what you imagine he would say. Yet you speak very little of what you believe.’

  ‘I guess that’s because so much of what Drakeforth says is beginning to make sense. Personally, I would like to embrace the certain belief that there is more to life than the simple biological urge to reproduce. I would like to believe in a higher power. I would like to feel that I could suspend my credulity and embrace something as simple and reassuring as Arthurianism. Except, I have personal experience of how completely indifferent the universe is. Wishing it were different won’t change the facts.’ I stopped speaking and breathed. The anger that Drakeforth so cheerfully wore on his sleeve now threatened to burst out of my carefully tended calm facade.

  ‘It would change how you experience the facts. How you respond to them, and how you enjoy your passage through what we so naively perceive as time and space,’ Hoptoad said.

  I stood up, ‘I would like to check on Drakeforth now, please.’

  Hoptoad stood with me. ‘Of course.’

  We left the snug confines of the lounge and went out under the dark vault of the night sky. The view through the clean country air was brighter than in the city, where light pollution reduced the sparkle of the stars. I found myself staring upwards, trying, in vain as always, to count the uncountable and to put some comprehension around the infinite.

  ‘Blows your mind, doesn’t it?’ Hoptoad said, his face also tilted upwards. ‘When I try to get my head around just how utterly infinite we can be I get an ice-cream headache. It is written that when Saint Diestock came unto his Revelation of the Pumpernickel the grandeur of it so overwhelmed him that he collapsed and died.’

  ‘Or maybe he died of something like a stroke or a heart attack and never had a revelation?’ I said, turning slowly and watching the galaxy spin before my eyes.

  ‘His disciple, the Offer of Bob, heard his dying breath. The sacred utterance was quite clear.’

  I didn’t reply, instead I drew my sense of wonder back into its physical shell and returned my gaze to the more easily comprehended ground beneath my feet.

  The monks of Arthur tended the sick, the injured and the insane in a low-roofed building beyond the vegetable gardens. The hospital with its whitewashed bricks and clay tile roof followed the concave curve of the monastery’s outer wall. We entered through a round door; the smell of antiseptics and incense mixed in the air like anchovies and chocolate. Oil lamps glowed with warm light at regular intervals along the walls. Hoptoad washed his hands at a sink near the door. I followed suit and we went down the aisle between two rows of beds. Very few of the patients were Arthurians; most looked lost and wretched, the people equivalent of abandoned puppies. I saw Drakeforth perched on the edge of a bed, shirtless, his shoulder now clean and bandaged. He gesticulated with his good arm at a slim, bearded woman who rocked slightly on the balls of her feet, hands clasped behind her back, while Drakeforth lectured at her.

  ‘Once again, Doctor Primum, you are relying on the ancient reports of a barely literate food taster to qualify your entire existence. There is no way she could have theorised the existence of alternate universes by regarding bowls of steamed vegetables.’

  ‘We do not ask the essential elements of existence why they deliver revelations unto us. We simply seek to understand the revelations received by those lucky enough to be in the right place at the moment of correct perception,’ the woman replied.

  ‘Suggesting Saint Birthoot conceived the theory of transition between high-energy states of sub-atomic particles by simply looking at the random patterns in a plate of peas and corn is ludicrous!’

  ‘And yet, that is what happened.’ The sister remained placid in the face of Drakeforth’s apoplexy.

  ‘You are all complete and utter morons!’ Drakeforth announced.

  ‘I am pleased to see you are feeling better, Drakeforth,’ I said hurriedly, stepping between them.

  ‘Please, get me out of this madhouse,’ he said petulantly.

  ‘I recommend you stay the night,’ the sister said. ‘You lost a lot of blood, and there is still the risk of infection.’

  ‘Why don’t you pray to Arthur to heal me?’ Drakeforth said with all the acid of a sour candy.

  ‘I trust Arthur to guide me to make the right use of my medical degree,’ the doctor replied. ‘In Arthur’s second Telling, the Synopsis of the Creation, he teaches us that he had little time for cooks who spit in their own food.’

  The doctor took a hypodermic syringe and injected a shot of something into Drakeforth’s arm.

  ‘This should help dull the pain,’ she said with a slight smile.

  ‘Help me with my shirt, Pudding.’ Drakeforth extended his good arm and I helped him dress in a clean cotton shirt the Arthurians had provided. A young monk hurried in to the ward and drew Hoptoad aside, whispering urgently in the old man’s ear.

  The doctor addressed us both. ‘You should have the dressing changed in a couple of days. The stitches will need to come out in about a week. If you become feverish, the wound begins to bleed, seep or smell bad, seek medical attention immediately.’

  ‘One last thing before you go,’ said Hoptoad, returning to the conversation. ‘The monastery is surrounded by Godden Energy Corporation agents.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I can only imagine that they feel they have not made their position clear to you previously,’ he continued.

  ‘I think Pretense made his point quite succinctly.’ I buttoned up Drakeforth’s shirt.

  ‘Is there another way out of here?’ Drakeforth asked as he worked his feet into his blood-splattered shoes.

  ‘Of course, but to use it you would need to spend a life time in contemplation and fine-tune your consciousness to the rhythm of the celestial song,’ H
optoad said.

  ‘In the next two minutes?’ Drakeforth asked.

  ‘We can offer you sanctuary,’ Hoptoad suggested.

  ‘That would be great, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll get you dressed in proper attire and then hide you among the faithful.’ Hoptoad sent the young monk off into the darkness and we hurried out of the ward and across the courtyard.

  I could hear the throbbing of helicopters overhead and see the golden fingers of their searchlights pointing at the trees and hills outside the monastery. We moved along the wall, passing the gardens and the pens where animals grunted, snorted, and watched us with yellow eyes.

  In the sermon hall, which Hoptoad called the Collider, because it was a place where ideas and people came together, we changed into the garb of the initiated. Donning wigs, false beards and brown robes, we blended into the throng of people now moving into the chamber and taking their positions around the spiral pattern in the floor. Hundreds of candles flickered in a refreshing draught that was flowing in through the open door, the light reflecting off the patchouli-polished wooden floor.

  ‘The desk,’ I whispered, turning to Drakeforth in horror.

  ‘Has been rescued,’ Hoptoad said calmly. ‘It is hidden in the herbarium.’

  ‘Okay …’ I didn’t have time to ask what the herbarium was and why it might be a good place to hide the living oak desk. Another thought struck me.

  ‘And, um … the other things in the back of the truck?’

  ‘They seemed overtly angry, so we left them tied up,’ Hoptoad said.

  ‘Is this a normal meeting?’ Drakeforth’s eyes were soft and dazed.

  ‘No meeting of the faithful is normal. We are all extraordinary,’ Hoptoad said.

  ‘The floor is on fire,’ Drakeforth said. I looked down. Hoptoad seemed unperturbed.

  ‘Doctor Primum may have given him too much,’ the monk explained.

  ‘Too much? Too much what?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure. It’s a herbal medicine. We use it as a painkiller and an antiseptic. It has some fascinating side effects.’